Our flight from Montreal to Halifax left at 11am. The airport was pretty quiet with no one at check in and very few people at security as well. We go through all of those very quickly and we found ourselves at the gate by 9am with more time to kill before our flight departed. Montreal is an interesting place in that everything is in French first. Everyone talks French to you and only when you clearly...
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We have eventually arrived in Canada. Unfortunately everything didn't go smoothly but we have arrived. We got to Heathrow at around 3:45pm and when we were clearing security we heard that the flight was going to be delayed for an hour. That hour turned into 2 hours and then eventually 3 hours. fortunately we were in the BA lounge and so we were comfortable at least while we waited. They have a new 'build your own...
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Yesterday evening we departed from Cape Town heading for Canada. This was the trip we should have done in June/July 2020 but obviously the pandemic intervened. We are grateful to be able to reschedule it to now. When I say 'We', it is just 4 of us - me, H and then my son and daughter-in-law (S & K). We are flying via London and so we had the day today in London. The flight over...
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Today was our last day. Our flight was at 1pm and so we had plenty of time to accumulate numbers 199 & 200 on the bird trip list. We had a late start as there was no need to rush as we were only just over 2 hours away from the airport. After packing up we headed to the Sunset Dam one last time to see if we could add any birds to the trip list....
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Today was a scorcher. Predicted to get to 39 C and it got there. At 3:15pm H checked the weather app and it said 37 C, feels like 47 C. At 7pm it was 32 degrees still. It was HOT, HOT, HOT! We did leave a little earlier this AM for the morning drive and decided to head north to the picnic spot Nkhulu on the Sabie river. It was overcast this morning so that made...
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We slept in a little yesterday and only headed out shortly after 6am. It was misty as we headed north to a picnic spot that overlooks a dam. We got further delayed in getting onto the dirt road to the dam by an elephant that decided to be half in the road eating from a tree on the side of the road. He wasn't budging and we waited for 15 minutes before he finally headed more...
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We aimed to leave later in the morning as the last change of camps was happening. As the crow flies, it is only about 60 kms between camps but we decided to take a slightly longer route via Skukuza as we had the time to do and both the road north and the one from Skukuza to Lower Sabie are known for their excellent game sightings. As we crossed one of the rivers, sure enough, another...
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H has never liked the camp and I've been indifferent about it but I've now swung H's direction. While the setting of the camp is really beautiful - on a dam with a small river flowing into it - the camp is dark and it is seriously in need of some maintenance. You simply couldn't use the hot plate at all. I tried to boil some eggs for breakfast yesterday and after waiting about 20 minutes...
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We changed camps today as we went from Crocodile Bridge to Berg-en-Dal. We decided to take the dirt road which runs along the southern boundary of the Kruger Park along the Crocodile River. Every time I drive that road I have not been disappointed and today was no exception. As we left the camp (literally right at the gate), a hyena ran across the road. It was a good start to a great day. About 10...
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The weather forecast was for overcast and rainy conditions the whole day. When we woke up it was only partly cloudy at that point. We decided to do the same route we did yesterday morning heading north then west and back south to camp again. The number of raptors had diminished a bit since yesterday but there were still a lot of them. About 10 kms up the road we saw a bunch of cars and...
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